Think, Check, Submit: how to choose a journal

Speak to any editor or publisher and they will tell you that their journal is the best place to publish, but that isn’t always true. In this article we’ll give you some tools to help you think a little more critically about your options, starting with a campaign called Think, Check, Submit. It was built by publishers, librarians and researchers in response to so-called “predatory publishers” – commercial organisations claiming to be Open Access publishers and charging authors for publication, but without proper peer review, Editorial Boards, indexing, and so on. Think, Check, Submit has a great checklist for assessing whether a publisher or a journal is trustworthy, and we encourage you to use it whenever you are submitting an article. Beyond trustworthiness, however, you need to consider a few other things before submitting work for review.

1. Scope

You probably have a list of preferred journals, and your instinct might be to start at the top of the list for every paper. Before you do that, consider the scope of each journal. Editors are busy people and will reject out-of-scope papers before peer review. By making sure your work is within scope before you submit it, you decrease the possibility that the paper will suffer a pre-screen reject. If you aren’t sure, then get in touch with the journal: any decent journal will answer pre-submission questions, though it’s likely to take a few days to consult the relevant editor. If you don’t get a reply, you should ask yourself how responsive the journal is likely to be during peer review and publication.

2. Reputation

You need to be confident your chosen journal has a profile among your peers that will enhance your professional profile and help you progress in your career. The check step of Think, Check, Submit talks about knowing the Editorial Board, but what about other authors? Do your peers publish in the journal? What about more senior people? Do they have good things to say about it? Your professional networks are a valuable resource and might well be able to help you in your search for the ‘right’ journal.

3. Profile and metrics

If you have been following the Microbiology Society you will know that we have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). We are among hundreds of institutions, funders, societies and publishers worldwide who are committed to using metrics that are appropriate to a situation, not simply relying on the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). A good journal will show you article-level metrics like usage stats and Altmetrics (a measure of social impact), and will be transparent about things like acceptance rates – though the latter is often on-request, rather than on the journal website.

When you are thinking about the profile of a journal, be ambitious but remember that a good-quality journal in your specialist area might be more appropriate than something like Nature. This will help you avoid the cycle of submitting to a high-profile journal, being reviewed and rejected, and having to start again.

4. Support

Different publishers handle operations in different ways. Particularly for less experienced authors, having a single point of contact to take you through peer review and production is a real benefit. Small publishers like the Microbiology Society often run their operations in-house, where the larger entities may outsource everything.

5. Openness

Last but certainly not least, think about Open. If your funder or institution has an Open Access (OA) policy, is the publisher compliant? This could be immediate OA for the version of record (gold OA), in which case there might be an article processing charge to pay, or policies which allow you to deposit the accepted version of your article (green OA) free of charge, potentially some months after publication. For articles in traditional subscription journals, there’s the related question about copyright – does the publisher require you to transfer copyright to them, or do they ask you to sign a license to publish, which means that you, the author, retain copyright and can reuse your own work without having to request permission first?

If in doubt, remember that the Microbiology Society, like many others, has a portfolio of journals and that publishing in our journals helps to support the Society, which in turn means we can support you, our community, now and in the future.